Google‘s new “knol” social knowledge project has a lofty-sounding goal: make the world’s knowledge easier to put on line. In reality, Google wants a piece of the social knowledge search results, and looks likely to get it.

Google has surely noticed that much of its search traffic is directed to Wikipedia, which regularly has an entry in the top five search results for any particular term. If Google could steer all that traffic toward its own properties instead, and if those properties contained Google ads, and if Google split its revenue with the article creators… well, it’s not hard to see why this would start to look pretty good to both Google and content creators, and why such an initiative could ramp up quickly.